Stealth Pilot Training Begins Despite Jet Delays

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Stealth Pilot Training Begins Despite Jet Delays

Marines welcome F-35Bs to Yuma, Arizona.

Photo: Lockheed Martin

Yesterday the Air Force officially cleared its pilots to begin formal training on the military's small fleet of early-model F-35A Joint Strike Fighters. The clearance followed a 46-day examination of the new plane's systems at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. "The team at Eglin went through a rigorous process to lead the way for F-35A training," said Gen. Edward Rice, the head of Air Education and Training Command.

Prior to Rice's go-ahead, only test pilots had flown the slowly growing fleet of so-called "fifth-generation" F-35s stationed at Eglin and at bases in Arizona, California and Maryland. There are three versions of the jet: the Air Force's lightweight F-35A, the Marines' vertical-landing F-35B and the larger, heavier Navy F-35C meant for at-sea carrier ops.

The rush to train stealth fighter pilots places the Air Force in the same camp as the Marine Corps, which stood up a combat-designated JSF squadron last month despite the unit possessing a mere three F-35Bs. Of the U.S. military branches slated to get their own versions of the JSF, only the Navy is holding off on forming frontline squadrons or training pilots.

At present the F-35 can't drop bombs or fire missiles. Its custom helmet-mounted sight doesn't work and Lockheed Martin's engineers are still tweaking the jet's design. And as late as this summer the JSF, which has been in development since 2001, still had a "scrap rate" of 16 percent, meaning roughly one out of every six parts on jets in production had to be removed and reworked or totally thrown out and replaced. That's double the scrap rate for most earlier warplanes at equivalent stages of development, according to the Pentagon.

With ongoing design work and a possible six-year gap between initial training and actual combat readiness, what's the rush?

Officially, the Air Force's plan is to incrementally ramp up its training program, from 36 pilots next year to a peak of hundreds annually. “We designed the system to start very slowly,” Rice told Aviation Week. The first few dozen fliers trained on the F-35 will become instructors for other instructors and, eventually, for combat pilots, thus carefully laying the foundation for 40 years or more of JSF operations involving a planned fleet of 1,763 Air Force F-35As and potentially tens of thousands of aviators in total.

But Ty Rogoway, an independent aviation analyst** and blogger, is skeptical. The F-35 is designed to be easy for beginner pilots, with docile handling and intuitive electronics. Currently, basic training for a new JSF pilot requires a total of 130 hours of instruction spread over six weeks of classroom studies, followed by six weeks of flying.

It shouldn't take six years to build up the JSF training base, and "training for training’s sake is a waste of taxpayer dollars," Rogoway wrote. (An hour of flying in an F-35 could cost $50,000 or more, according to an estimate by Center for Defense Information analyst and stealth skeptic Winslow Wheeler. Today's F-16s cost less than half that per hour.)

"If the jet’s envelope is so restricted and its mission systems are not even operable then we are paying tens of thousands of dollars an hour to have pilots whiz around in these things, for what?" Rogoway asked. "It seems like a PR stunt to me."

He may have a point.

The hurry to begin training could reflect worry within the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin over the $396 billion JSF program's worsening reputation and sales prospects. Training flights might look like progress at a time when the F-35, which at a projected $1 trillion over 50 years to buy and operate is history's priciest weapons program, desperately needs good news. Note also Lockheed's recent, dubious claim that the JSF will actually grow more stealthy over time, the opposite of the historical trend for radar-evading jets.

The F-35's development is jointly funded by a consortium of 10 countries, including the U.K., Canada, Italy and Australia. The partners were supposed to buy hundreds of JSFs, helping drive down the per-plane cost. But in recent months several of the developer states have cut back or canceled their orders for the new jet, citing uncertainties over schedule, price and performance.

Just last week Canada nixed plans to buy 65 F-35s to replace its aged F/A-18s, blaming the cancellation on a threefold cost increase over Lockheed's original estimate. Earlier the U.K. had cut its own F-35 order by two-thirds and Italy by a quarter, and Australia had pushed back by several years its planned purchase of at least 70 JSFs. Japan, which selected the F-35 only last year to replace four dozen ancient F-4s, has already threatened to cancel its JSF order if the acquisition bill rises.

So far the wavering foreign support has not affected the Pentagon's F-35 acquisition. This week the Defense Department signed a $3.8-billion contract with Lockheed for the purchase of a fifth batch of new JSFs numbering 32.

But looking ahead, shrinking foreign orders could boost the price of an F-35 and force foreign governments in particular to cut back even more on their purchases of the new jet. That feedback loop of escalating cost and decreasing quantity, called the "death spiral," has effectively killed off or severely curtailed many U.S. warplane programs. The death spiral is why the Air Force possesses just 180 or so F-22s instead of hundreds more, and only 20 B-2 bombers rather than six times that number, as originally intended.

"We are moving along; we are hitting all parts of the envelope; we are seeing a high-performing, fifth-generation airplane,” Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed's vice president for F-35 business development, assured reporters this summer.

The facts do not necessarily support such a rosy view. But if the F-35 is going to avoid the death spiral and survive in its current form, O'Bryan's claim needs to at least appear to be true to foreign buyers of the new plane. The Air Force's confident commencement of JSF flight training, six years before any frontline pilots are even needed, could be just the thing to restore confidence in the troubled stealth fighter.